A peer-to-peer approach to wireless LAN roaming

ABSTRACT

We make the case for a Global Confederation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Wireless Local Area Networks. A P2P Wireless Network Confederation (P2PWNC) is a community of administrative domains that offer wireless Internet access to each other's registered users. The ubiquitous Internet access that the roaming users of these domains could enjoy compensates for their home domain's cost of providing access to visitors. Existing roaming schemes utilize central authorities or bilateral contracts to control access to resources. In contrast, a P2PWNC forms a pure P2P community in which participating domains are autonomous entities. Domains make independent decisions concerning the amount of bandwidth they contribute. As a result, similarly to existing P2P systems, a P2PWNC will suffer from "free-riding" if no incentive mechanisms exist to ensure that domains offer the amount of resources that is economically justified. Flexible rules on reciprocity can be set to delimit domain actions and encourage domains to provide in order to consume. In this paper, we present several aspects of the P2PWNC requirements and design. We outline several P2PWNC implementation issues relating to user privacy and the confederation's real-world deployment. We also describe the P2PWNC prototype that we developed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Adar, E., and Huberman, B.A. Free Riding on Gnutella, First Monday, vol. 5, no. 10, 2000.
• 2: Anton, B., Bullock, B., and Short, J. Best Current Practices for Wireless Internet Service Provider Roaming, Wi-Fi Alliance Public Document, Feb. 2003. http://www.wi-fi.org.
• 3: Antoniadis, P., and Courcoubetis, C. Market Models for P2P Content Distribution, AP2PC'02, Bologna, Italy, July 2002.
• 4: Panayotis Antoniadis , Costas Courcoubetis , Elias C. Efstathiou , George C. Polyzos , Ben Strulo, Peer-to-Peer Wireless LAN Consortia: Economic Modeling and Architecture, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing, p.198, September 01-03, 2003
• 5: Braynard, R., Kostic, D., Rodriguez, A., Chase, J., and Vahdat, A. Opus: an Overlay Peer Utility Service, Proc. 5th OPENARCH, June 2002.
• 6: BWCS Report. WISP Roaming - Single Subscription, Global Reach, May 2003.
• 7: Camponovo, G., Heitmann, M., Stanoevska-Slabeva, K., and Pigneur, Y. Exploring the WISP Industry: Swiss Case Study, 16th Electronic Commerce Conference, Bled, Slovenia, 2003.
• 8: Courcoubetis, C., and Weber, R. Pricing Communications Networks: Economics, Technology and Modelling, Wiley, Interscience Series in Systems and Optimization, 2003, 139--140.
• 9: David Chaum, Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.10, p.1030-1044, Oct. 1985 [doi>10.1145/4372.4373]
• 10: Desmedt, Y. Threshold Cryptography, European Transactions on Telecommunications, vol. 5, no. 4, 1994, 449--457.
• 11: Lopatic, T., Eckert, C., and Baumgarten, U. MMIP - Mixed Mobile Internet Protocol, CMS'97, Sept. 1997, 77--88.
• 12: Pass-One - WISP association. Mission statement. http://www.pass-one.com.
• 13: Sylvia Ratnasamy , Paul Francis , Mark Handley , Richard Karp , Scott Schenker, A scalable content-addressable network, Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, p.161-172, August 2001, San Diego, California, United States
• 14: Didier Samfat , Refik Molva , N. Asokan, Untraceability in mobile networks, Proceedings of the 1st annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.26-36, November 13-15, 1995, Berkeley, California, United States [doi>10.1145/215530.215548]
• 15: Ion Stoica , Robert Morris , David Liben-Nowell , David R. Karger , M. Frans Kaashoek , Frank Dabek , Hari Balakrishnan, Chord: a scalable peer-to-peer lookup protocol for internet applications, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), v.11 n.1, p.17-32, February 2003 [doi>10.1109/TNET.2002.808407]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Distributed networks

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Packet-switching networks; Wireless communication; Network communications

General Terms:
Design, Economics, Legal Aspects, Security

Keywords:
P2P, WISP, WLAN, Wi-Fi, incentives, mixes, privacy, roaming